Tesla Staff Face New Layoffs – Report

More bad news for Tesla’s workforce, after it was reported that a fresh round of job cuts are on the way, as is another hiring freeze.

According to a report by Electrek, citing a source familiar with the matter, Tesla is expected to implement another wave of layoffs in the next quarter.

It comes as Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk continues to be accused by Wall Street and Tesla investors of being AWOL at Tesla for a large stretch of 2022, after he successfully acquired Twitter in October and brought his chaotic management style to bear at the social network.

AWOL CEO

Tesla’s board of directors have come under pressure to replace Elon Musk as CEO, after Tesla’s share price has sunk by nearly 60 percent since Musk began his $44 billion dalliance with Twitter in April this year.

Musk this week has confirmed he will step down from being CEO of Twitter, but he said he will still lead Twitter’s software and server teams.

Musk has tried to blame the sinking price partly on macroeconomic factors, replying in a tweet “as bank savings account interest rates, which are guaranteed, start to approach stock market returns, which are *not* guaranteed, people will increasingly move their money out of stocks into cash, thus causing stocks to drop.”

However there is no disguising the fact that the call from Wall Street for Musk to step down has been growing in recent weeks.

Job losses

Now according to the Electrek report, Tesla is to implement another round of job cuts in the next quarter and is also going to freeze hiring.

Shares of Tesla rose 1 percent to $139.25 in trading before the bell on the news.

It should be remembered that Tesla in June announced it would axe its salaried workforce by roughly 10 percent over the next three months.

At the time Tesla employed roughly 100,000 staff, and a 10 percent workforce reduction saw as many as 10,000 people losing their jobs.

That came after Musk issued a series of no nonsense emails to all Tesla workers, telling them to return to the office full time or resign.

Later in June the restructuring activities continued after 200 staff were made redundant, and its San Mateo office in California was closed down.

The San Mateo office was where Tesla staff worked on improving the company’s driver assistance systems including Autopilot.

The cost cutting measures came after CEO Elon Musk earlier this year told Tesla executives in an email that he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and planned to cut headcount by 10 percent and “pause all hiring worldwide.”

Tesla was sued by two former staff who allege the company broke the law in laying them off, along with about 10 percent of Tesla’s workforce, without notice required by federal law.

Elon Musk in May also revealed that Tesla’s new factories in Texas and Berlin were losing “billions of dollars”.